rosa amarela, voz de todo grito

[dtissagirl]

A very Happy Birthday to the mighty crackers4jenn! Hope you have a wonderful day, dear. :)

...

Because I'm feeling ignored by my flist [mea culpa though, Logan had no pants. Still.]: GO LOOK AT MY BSG ICONS! Humpf

Comments

[dtissagirl]

The selective color thing is Angie's. I just stole it from her a looong time ago. :)

We do pretty much the same thing, I guess. I'm glad that I'm not the only one who ends up with 5-6 layers of just prep though -- most of the time I think I'm doing something much more complicated than I should. ;)

[dubhartach]

My default approach is a modification of yours.

I cheat and use auto levels/contrast/oolour correction.
Unsharp mask
Duplicate times 3
Top duplicate - screen (repeat as often as needed to lighten as much as I want) Desaturate that layer a lot
Middle duplicated - Soft light - fiddle with brightness/contrast or levels (favourite is to crank constrast and brightness right up so it is very washed out but often that looks crap)
Bottom duplicated - exclusion
Between screen and soft light layer put *something* - exclusion fill layer, gradient or a texture often on overlay

[dtissagirl]

Oh, I do the between screen and soft light thing for ALL my color -- all gradients and stuff go between those layers. It's like you can control the coloring better if it's stuck between those two image layers. :)

[_jems_]

Crop/resize (to 200x200)
Duplicate layer
Sharpen (sometimes, depends on the quality of the cap)
Fiddle with Brightness/Contrast/Saturation until the image is bright enough
Add a yellow or peach-ish gradient layer set to Overlay with decreased opacity

That's all she wrote.

[dtissagirl]

Your method is SO simple! I usually have 6+ layers of prep stuff. But hey, it works. :)

[awmp]

hmm, it always depends on the caps, but generally I crop it to 200x200 (because I'm weird I like to work on a bigger canvas)

I duplicate the layer and use auto contrast/levels/colours in whatever combination looks good for it and set it on screen mode.

I duplicate again and set it to soft light or overlay mode and desaturate it. sometimes I blur this layer.

if the whole thing is too dark I set a creamy white or fawn layer on soft light on top and fade the transparency.

last thing is the sharpening, I sharpen and fade each layer with whatever setting looks good on it.

for even more contrast/level adjustments I use adjustment layers, but this totally depends on what look I want to achieve.

[dtissagirl]

It seems a lot of people work on a 200x200 canvas. I'm good with 100x100, probably because I work with as much zoom as possible. :)

Thanks for sharing your tipes -- I sometimes think I'm doing something completely crazy, but I see from the comments that pretty much every one goes through similar paths to prep the caps. :)

[mangofandango]

I use the Gimp, so it's a bit different, but here's what I generally do:

Crop to a square, resize to 100x100, duplicate once and screen (sometimes I do it once or twice more, depending on how dark the image is), duplicate again and set to soft light, desaturate the soft light layer (and sometimes up the contrast). Then I add a blue exclusion layer most of the time (usually with the opacity turned down quite a bit), along with another layer of varying color/gradient and setting, depending on the image. Often, I put a white overlay layer in somewhere as well, and I move it around and adjust the opacity depending on how it looks. Then I sharpen each layer once or twice.

I must ask (and maybe the icons will fill me in, so I should have looked first) - what's BSG?

[dtissagirl]

I guess even if we're working with different softwares, and we don't take the exact same steps, the process is still pretty much the same -- it's all about finding a balance between the screen and the soft light layers. :)

And BSG is Battlestar Galactica. My brand new obsession. :)